Re: SETI@Home

From: Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Sun Mar 04 2001 - 23:57:38 MST


Ken Clements wrote:

> Eugene, isn't that a bit harsh? Please remember that they were born with almost
> no money in their mouths. They do not consider their mission to be the design and

Right, but so was distributed.net. Contrary to distributed.net, they never opened
up to volunteer developers, and their clients remained closed source. Instead of
reinventing a wheel, and a triangular one at that, they should have written a yet
another distributed.net client, using existing infrastructure. Their clients were
buggy. They were entirely nonresponsive both at personal email and website level.
They chose to waste a bulk of cycles on Windows clients by painting pretty picture
instead of crunching. They did not have enough data to crunch, so they started
forking over the same blocks to different clients. And so on.

> construction of the world's most reliable distributed computing system. They just
> want to process their data, and have found a cheep way to do so through the
> volunteers. They got up to a GB a day before the crash, which is nothing to look

They shouldn't have treated their volunteers like cattle. They certainly haven't
earned the resource they're using.

> down your nose at.
>
> The sys admin for SETI is a friend of mine, and I had a chance to ask him about
> the situation yesterday. He told me that thieves went after about $10k of copper
> cables, and in the process of ripping them off, messed up the fiber that SETI
> uses. He would agree with you, in that they do not have what they would like to

A distributed client architecture which processes one GByte a day using millions
of computers world wide and which gets taken out by a single broken fiber
is a collossal joke.

I'm not surprised because it integrates seamlessly into SETI@home neat track of
incompentence.

> have by way of true distribution. He said that they are all quite concerned about
> what is going to happen when they try to turn the system back on, and those couple
> of million clients try to log in at once.

Gee, how very unexpected. Don't you see a problem with that statement of that admin
friend of yours?



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